Everything Clear?: Incomprehensible Loss, an Opaque New Life, and Other Funny Things

Mohammed Taleb’s Everything Clear? is a seven-minute absurdist comedy that makes a feature of a bug: it uses its low budget look to set up a sense of folk theatre. As its plot breaks down into irrationality, the forfeit of high production values allows its core emotion to flourish. A maddening and literal loss of meaning. So why not laugh and why not dance and why not just do things wrong? Everything is good and clear anyway.

The plot is of a crisis dogging the German education ministry and its refugee students (Moataz Al-Sheikh, Hassan Harmal, Alaa Modhesh, and Mohammad Kenani). The students are failing to learn and the ministry’s hires are failing to teach. The serenely optimistic face of a first-world life smiles on even as its targets languish alone without their families and their mother tongues. A sense of sublimated trauma exists within the genuinely funny narrative, a conversion of loss—of home, identity, security, knowledge—into laughter.

It opens with a glimpse of German public transport. Set to a catchy soundtrack that enmeshes an almost frantic grief within it, the beats repeat like the march of trains, active, orderly, but unbending to the fumbles and failures of passengers. The memory of bombings run a loop at the same as unequipped teachers conclude every lesson with a hopeful, useless Alles klar? Is everything clear? How absurd the question becomes when nothing is transparent, nothing open to ready comprehension.

The only clarity you can have is to see that everything will make you feel stupid, alien, barely human, because the language and the culture and the system are now no longer yours. If meaning does not break down it is because it does not exist in the first place. Alles and klar are mere sounds that entwine with other, meaning annihilating sounds.

Despite this sombre elaboration and because of its cause, Everything Clear? is a thorough laugh. All its creative choices—right down to the education minister’s bad wig—reinforce the absurdity at the heart of contemporary life. Alles gut with this comedy.